One crafty bitch…

If the yellow submarine had a uniform

A while back I got a hankering to make some basic long-sleeved T-shirts. I’ve got some knit fabrics stashed and I wear a lot of T-shirts, so that seemed like a good idea. I looked through my backlog of patterns and didn’t find a basic top among them. There were pleats and seams and geegaws and such.

It was time to bust out my basic slopers and pattern making book and get to it. Drafting the pattern wasn’t hard, in fact I rather enjoy pattern making. I sewed up a quick “muslin” making sure my seams matched and the sleeves went into the armholes. Check!

Now it was time to customize the pattern a bit, change the neckline and do a bit of tweaking. So this yellow submarine tee is the first effort of many more iterations to come. As you can see in the photo, it’s not terribly well made and the neckline gave me fits and still has puckers but it’s wearable. My first neck was so bad I cut it off and used this tutorial with much more success. I also found this good article from Threads about customizing a T-shirt pattern.

My next T-shirt should be an improvement on this one, plus I get faster each time I make one. That will be a good thing to reduce the stash size.